Tom Sawyer's Philosophy

Chapter 5 of my book was authored by Robert Probst and was titled: Tom Sawyer, Teaching, and Talking. In the chapter, Probst asserts that many students who are in are classrooms to learn, are often passive learners. Yes, many will do the work in order to get the grade, or move up to an advanced placement class, or even to make their parents happy, but often those learners are just jumping through the hoops for that extrinsic reward, not because they enjoy or are excited about what we are teaching.

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, some of the scenarios Probst described did sound familiar. He addresses the problem, and points out that many times, through the work we assign, we are adding to this problem, as much of the work asks students to focus on "...recitation, rather than authentic discussion, as the common mode of discourse in most classrooms (pp. 46)." Part of the problem is that we are doing too much of the work for the students! What? Teachers do too much, sounds crazy, right? If our final goal is to have students become life-long readers, Probst asserts that we must teach them to have authentic discussions about literature, and to give them more ownership of those discussions, rather than always guiding them through our own questions and ideas. Hence, the Tom Sawyer reference, have students do more of the work than we are doing. 

Obviously this idea takes some, well for lack of a better word, training. We should serve as facilitators to guide students to, first of all, create authentic questions, and then use those questions to guide discussions in small groups and whole class discussions. If you are like me, my first reaction was to doubt that my students would be capable of producing those thought stimulating questions that I have been "trained" to do through my years of schooling and experience. However, Probst provides some ideas that seem surprisingly easy and manageable to help students get to the point where they are producing thought stimulating questions over literature.

One idea is to initially have students share their questions out loud and write versions of them on the board (I envision kind of guiding the questions, possibly adding to or altering them if needed, but maybe that's me being too in control, I'm not sure). The class would then be broken into groups to analyze and answer the question before sharing with the whole class. Another idea is to have students create questions, then put them in groups to present and discuss questions. The third option is to collect questions students have created, then sort the questions into stacks. These stacks will then determine the groups, and again students will meet and discuss.

I decided to use a version of these ideas in my class today. As we read a chapter in our novel, students recorded two questions on an index card, one on each side. I then had students walk around the room until I felt they were "mixed" well. I then had students stop and talk to a person who was close by. Each student shared one of the two questions from their card and they discussed. We then mixed again, and students shared the other question with a different classmate. As it was our first time doing this, I was very pleased with some of the questions students created and the discussions which were held. I'm excited to have students take even more ownership in their discussions!